High Five...Pictures!

So because I've been so crap-tastic at updating the blog (I haven't even finished telling about the Mopsos survey, let alone talking about what I've been doing now at Kinet Hoyuk), I will finally bring you up to date in my narrative through a series of photos.

Let us begin.

The Mopsos group
(Back Row L-R: Muge {one of the Bilkent Grad Students}, Nicole {A fellow Crow Canyon High School Field School alum! Though, two years after me}, Joe, Brandon {Penn State PhD student}, Ashley, Moi, Sandra {She writes grants for the project. Honestly, don't know why she was with us}. Front Row L-R: Kirstie, Chris, Ben, Binnyurhamin {Our Rep}, Prof Killebrew, Tour Guide for this field trip, Silvia {Graphic Artist/Illistrator}, Prof Hritz)

I forgot to mention another reacurring theme of the survey (Actually my whole time in Turkey), encounters with the local wildlife!

These two snakes had made their home, burrowed underground in a burnt portion of field, about 12-15 ft in front of where we had set up the total station that day to take coordinates. They were very long (at least two feet each) and they kept popping out of the ground and slithering closer and closer to us. We cut field work a half hour short that day.

Yeah. That's a tarantula. These furry friends would crawl down from the ivy on the outside of the monastery. They'd try to find some place warm to curl up for the night such as a stairwell, a shower or a bed. You know just the usual nooks and crannies.


I also had the great fortune of having a scorpion siting.

Mind you it was very tiny (as in the the size of my pinkie).

I think the grand total was something a long the lines of 14 tortoises/turtles seen while out doing our survey. Inexplicably, we gave them all Spanish sounding names (Zeus, Diego, Consuela, Juan etc). This one's name was originally Fernando or Fransisco. However, as Muge decided to keep this 'lil guy as a present for her grandmother's garden his official name became, Eduardo Vedder Alexander Esteban Junior.

On now to GIS fun!

To give a better idea of what this mapping program is all about here is what I had to do for my final project:This map encompasses the southern half of the overall survey area for the Mopsos Project. Just as a FYI, those blue dots that you see in the center portion of the map, near to the coast, are the sites that we surveyed throughout the month. We covered 20 known sites or 196 known sites. That number grows every year. But back to my point:

This map is just a scanned version of the 1950's hardcopy map. Why even bother with a 1950's map, you ask? Because no one has bothered to update it since then, this was the last detailed map made of this area. So for our final project, to test our GIS skills and help out the project, my classmates and I were given portions of the map to digitize (ie trace over all the roards and waterways; mark all settlements, hills be they natural or artificial, wells etc). In this way if a change has occurred between an element on the map and today's landscape the change can be easily made. My portion is the approximately the red squared off portion. So it went from the above map to this:

All the new elements that you see in the Legend were added by your's truly. This is the product of 18+ hours of tedious tracing, map reading and computer nonesense. It maketh my eyes bleedeth.

This is a moment in our 4:30PM-Dinner time part of our schedule...POTTERY WASHING! Also, on most field work days one student and a staff member would stay back (So during the 5AM-1:30PM portion of the schedule). The staff person would do paper work, the student would scrub ceramics til his or her hands bled. Well, not quite that long but we were very pruney at the end of washing.

Washing pottery on the balconies of the monastery overlooking Iskenderun.
(L-R: Kirstie, Joe, Chris, Ashley and Nicole)

That long table in the upper right hand corner of the picture is the pottery sorting area.

After pottery was scrubbed clean and dried, we would lay out the pottery according to type.

Rims, handles, bases, body sherds roof tiles and rocks were the general categories, but sub groups could be created if the sorter found it necessary (Painted, decorated etc). Prof Killebrew would then go through everything and discard the non-diagnostic (ie uninteresting) pieces, but all ways take note of how many were found, the time period(s) that pottery collection encompassed etc.

Even though it got to be about 90 degrees or more (plus humidity) everyday while working in the field, I would always wear longs and longs, my super swank shades and my super awesome fedora (Yeah that's right. It's not just any type of hat and it's my shout out to Henry Jones Jr *coughnamethatmoviecough*)

Out in the field working hard, hardly working.

CLOSE UP. Haters, step back. A look this good can only be imitated, never duplicated.

Life on the Mopsos Project was not all work no play...just very little of it.

During our free time we'd often shoot hoops with some of the local Turkish kids. This picture is after we got pulled into a soccer that lasted 3 1/2 hours. Can you find me (Hint: I'm the hottest hot mess out of everyone)?

We also took field trips to places such as:

Nemrut Dagh


Karatepe


Tarsus

And that friends and family is the rest of my world-wind wrap up of my time on the Mopsos Survey Project. Next up will be my time spent here at Kinet. And hopefully that will be posted BEFORE I make back stateside (fingers crossed).

Over and out.

Love,
~Abby~

More on Mopsos

What a very strange couple of weeks it has been. I'm now on my second project for the summer and have actually been here for a week and a half. Wow. Let me say it again, I'm REALLY crappy at this blogging thing. Let's rewind to my first project (Mopsos) and then I'll spring ahead to what I am doing now.

When I last wrote I had just given you a list of the main players I had been working with on the Mopsos Project. Two people who I tragically left out but without whom we would not have been able to accomplish anything are, Muge and Evren. This dynamic duo are students (Well alumni in Muge's case as she graduated last month), at Bilkent University in Ankara. This school is particularly cool because not only is it known to have the best archaeological department in Turkey, but the whole school's curriculum (Every department for Undergrad, Graduate, MA, PhD etc) is taught in English. So both speak English extremely well, and of course Turkish.

I need to interject for a moment. It should be known that the "theme" of my time here in Turkey besides being about archaeology, has been about technological difficulties (This will make sense as I continue my narrative). We now resume your very delayed update.

The monastery that was our home base, is located in a small village called Guzelyayla, in the hills over looking the Bay of Iskenderun as well as the city the Bay is named for. Those first four to five days upon arriving in Turkey, however, were spent getting an introduction at blazing speed of GIS and what the Mopsos project was all about, not our location.

(View from the monastery at dawn for pottery washing. More on that later, but you can just make out the bay and the city in the distance, through the fog, to the left of the picture.)

So, I actually did not set foot outside the monastery until our Turkish Ministry Representative joined us. The Rep is key to keep projects running because all foreign archaeological excavations/projects have to be supervised by a Rep from the Turkish government, and no fieldwork can begin until two things happen: 1) the Rep gives us the thumbs up and 2) all foreign participants get a residency permit.

Us foreigners on the project were working under research permits (As opposed to tourist permits) and because we're also in Turkey for an extended period of time we had to register with the regional police department in Antakya, to get our residency permits. So the day after our Rep arrived we made the trek to Antakya. There we gave the police copies of our passports and our address at the monastery, so they could find us just in case***. Once we got all of our paper work sorted out, the following day we were able to start the fieldwork.

Fieldwork days (Which were just about everyday) went like this:
4:15-4:45 AM Wake up
5:00 AM On the van to head out to the field
6:00-6:30 AM Depending on how far we had to travel begin fieldwork
9:00 AM Breakfast
1:00-1:30 PM Stop fieldwork and head back to the monastery
2:00-2:30 Lunch time
Free time til 4:30 PM
4:30-7:00 PM GIS lesson or landscape archaeology lecture or pottery washing/sorting/labeling/cataloging
7:00 PM Dinner time
Free time the rest of the evening/paperwork catch up time.

As I mentioned probably three times before, surveying for our project involved two primary forms of data collection: Coordinates taken for mapping and surface collection of pottery. To take coordinates we used hand-held GPS units, and primarily (in theory) a total station unit. A total station is a device that allows you to do two things: give you "real world coordinates" of you location (this is opposed to creating your own grid system to find your location on a map), as well as measure topography. Okay, I think I'm getting too technical. You know those guys in construction companies who wander highways with one guy looking through a device mounted on a tripod, at another guy x number of feet away with a pole to take measurements? That's a total station.

The problem with ours however was just about EVERYTHING. The total station was rented here in Turkey, but as Prof Hritz was going to be the one operating the machine we asked for it to be programmed in English. It came in Turkish. Then it would miscalculate coordinates. Then it would say were were in the southern hemisphere when we obviously were not. So the first, oh, week was lost on the mapping side of things because the Total Station was cracked out.

It was eventually discovered, after a good two weeks of dealing with these problems, that the over lying problem that caused most of our troubles was that the device was programed in gradians. Turkey apparently has an extra 40 degrees that know one told us about.

We also had three computer system crashes, one virus contracted, one computer fry in a power surge(Mine FYI. RIP my Mac *tear*), an iPod crash (Mine, too), a flash drive stop working, and two cell phones blocked by the Turkish government (Oh yeah one of those were mine as well), just to give you an idea of some of the other technological problems the team incurred. The technology Gods have not been kind to us (of me) this trip.

On the pottery collection side, things went pretty smoothly so long as the GPS units were working (We started the month with five functional GPS' we ended the month with two). Working in pairs, once we were at an identified site (A place already listed as having archaeological remains), we would get a series of coordinates. Using the GPS units we would walk out to one of the corrdinates, then we would collect all the pottery/artifacts within 10 meters of our point. Later that pottery would be washed, dried, sorted, cataloged and labeled.

We did other types of collections and did more besides work but *sigh* another post that has gotten too long. To be continued.

Love,
~Abby~

***Which they did. Eight-ish days into the project two Doctors from the ministry of health hunted all the people that traveled on MY flight from JFK to Istanbul (Which included two of my fellow students and a Professor) to give us a five day dose of a Turkish Tamiflu equivalent. Some poor sole apparently flew in the same tin can as us and exposed us to Swine Flu.***